Freekstorm VFX Blog

About a week ago, Rich discovered a completely awesome short film about Big Stompy Robots and was consequently inspired to practice animating his own. For several days and nights I barely saw him, but today I eventually managed to drag him out for coffee and force him to tell me what exactly he was doing (in words of one syllable that a mere mortal like myself could actually understand):

Step 1: Rich went shopping for a Big Stompy Robot model which would be suitable for animation. He eventually chose a suitable Poser figure, exported it from Poser into Softimage and then broke apart the model into various body parts (poor little thing) that would need animating, eg feet, legs, thighs etc.



Step 2: He then rigged the model. Given that the model has a very unusual joint structure, it took quite a few attempts to make a rig that moved in a realistic motion. The final rig had only three controls: the main centre of gravity for the hips and a control for each foot. This allowed complete animation of movement. (Note for future: Rich intends to later animate the gun barrels and add rocket launchers. Personally I think he’s been playing too much Supreme Commander!)

Step 3: He then added a bump map to the model. This was created by doing a high pass filter in Photoshop on the texture map for the model.

Step4: This involved building a walk cycle animation, which caused lots of fun because Rich didn’t realise that he had put one of the feet on backwards! The result was that the leg moved in all three axis when he tried to animate it, so he had to break the model apart again and re-do the rigging in order to get it right.

Step 5: After animating the walk cycle, Rich loaded the model into the matchmoved footage of our ping pong table (from last time, if you recall) and finished the render. To add a bit of interaction to it, he added a model car (a Mercedes – they really do deserve to be stomped on) and enabled “hard body simulation” in Softimage. This allowed the car to react when the Big Stompy Robot walked into it.

So here’s the result:






Kinda cute, eh? I think it’s kinda dainty-of-foot for something that’s supposed to be so big and scary, so it’s obviously a girl robot. Let’s call her Tippitoes. In fact Tippitoes is so darn cute that I’m thinking of casting her in a future movie. More on that in due course...